“Hurricane Season pounds with intensity and fierceness and love. Naima and Alixa are truly forces of nature, delivering a performance that will move you to tears and to action.”

“Hurricane Season: The Hidden Messages In Water” is an award winning multimedia show and visionary movement-building strategy that obliterates the boundaries between performance and activism. Through a tapestry of spoken-word poetry, video projection, dance, shadow art, and a sound collage of personal testimonies, Hurricane Season: the hidden messages in water connects the issues that surfaced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the “unnatural disasters” disenfranchised communities are experiencing nationwide and worldwide on a daily basis.

“Hurricane Season” tackles climate change, environmental injustice, poverty, over-policing, mass-imprisonment, militarization, corporate globalization, and displacement as they manifest from one gulf to another. “The hidden messages in water” reveal the creative potency of the shifting time we are living in: the opportunity inherent in disaster to make a radical difference in the way we relate to ourselves, each other, and the planet.

With a set built of bamboo, calabash, and water that surrounds the audience in a circle of shadow and light, Hurricane Season transforms spaces into sanctuaries of healing, witness, and imagination. Unflinching and uplifting, Hurricane Season takes audiences on voyages of unthinkable tragedy and undeniable promise from the eye of a systemic storm.

An integral part of every show is the “solutions-cipher,” a forum that addresses the impacts of the issues surfaced in Hurricane Season on a local level, and illuminates solutions driven by those most impacted, that are already underway. The objective of the “solutions-ciphers” is to cross-pollinate creative strategies for self-determination and to turn the passion generated in the show into action manifested in the community. Representatives from local grassroots groups that are doing groundbreaking work around the issues brought up in Hurricane Season are featured at the dialogs to garner support for their initiatives and give audience members access into local social justice movements.

Through a massive orchestration that mobilized inter-generational and cross-class communities countrywide, Alixa and Naima traveled over 11,000 miles with an all-women crew in a grease-powered bus, delivering “Hurricane Season” to thousands of people in more than 50 cities. In all the shows combined they featured close to 200 community-based organizations to draw vital connections between shared struggles and common solutions in a critical moment in human history. City to city, back to back, Climbing PoeTree packed houses, auditoriums, theaters, churches, youth centers, converted cafeterias and soup kitchens, with people who testified again and again that attending “Hurricane Season” was one of the most moving experiences of their lives!

Following the national and regional tours in 2008 and 2009, Hurricane Season was selected for a month-long run at the world renowned National Black Theater in Harlem with a sold-out finale, and Climbing PoeTree has since been traveling with excerpts of the performance across the nation.

If you are interested in bringing this educational and transformational production to your college, university, conference, festival or high school contact us.